MaXXXine is all about XXX-rated thrills, starting with the triple Xs in the title.
Fans of director Ti West and star Mia Goth who have seen the previous movies in this trashy trilogy (X and Pearl) know what they’re in for—an over-the-top, retro film made the way movies were made decades ago, when they were shot on film.
In this case, it’s the decade of the Eighties, a world of wicker furniture, coin-operated pay phones, video stores, and an abundance of cocaine. It’s a story set in Hollywood where our protagonist, Maxine Minx is struggling to rise above stardom in the world of porn to stardom in legitimate movies.
When we meet her in a dark, cavernous movie sound stage, she is auditioning for a part in a fictional slasher-type flick titled Puritan II. She recites her lines, cries on cue and readily obliges when asked to show her breasts. Oddly, the audience is not offered a peek in this Peek Show of a movie, but she seems to impress the shadowy, snobby filmmakers who immediately offer her the part.
There is a lot of teasing in MaXXXine, which one might expect would be a movie about nudity, sex and pornography. Curiously, it steers away from nudity and sex and more toward the violence and murder that also defined the Eighties.
As mentioned, the movie takes place in Los Angeles in the Eighties where a serial killer was on the loose in real life, murdering young women and evading the police. For those of us who can’t remember the Eighties, or might not have been around in the Eighties, the opening scenes of Maxxxine include news clips that set the stage and provide the pop culture context for the story. It’s a great setup.
If you haven’t seen the backstory of Maxine Minx in the previous installments, she is quickly revealed as a very ambitious young woman who will do whatever it takes to achieve success. She’s a flawed, but driven character in a world of corruption—a coke-snorting, pistol-packing, ball-busting hellion, capable of breaking all the rules to get what she wants.
It’s a steep, ugly climb, made more difficult and complicated when she discovers that there is a killer on the loose stalking, torturing and murdering some of her closest female friends. At that point she realizes that her journey is not just about success, it’s about survival.
In terms of story and style, MaXXXine reminded me of the work of Brian De Palma, who made a career out of making bloody slasher movies loosely based on the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Obsession (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980) are good examples. Whatever they lacked in sophistication, they made up for with gallons of blood and gore. Granted, there was blood and gore in some of Hitchcock’s best work like the shower sequence in Psycho. The difference was the fact that it was tasteful gore that was shocking without being graphic.
There are Hitchcock references galore in MaXXXine, from the backlot set of the Bates Motel and the Norman Bates creepy house in the distance, to a closeup shot of a shower drain that is burned into our collective cinematic consciousness. Young filmmakers never seem to miss an opportunity to be cool and do a nod to the master. Someone should write a book about it.
Other classic movies are referenced such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Kevin Bacon’s character in MaXXXine -- a sleazy, scary private investigator -- looks strikingly like Jack Nicholson’s character, J.J. Gittes, in Chinatown, right down to the suit, hat and bloody bandage across his nose.
Speaking of the nose reference, a villain in MaXXXine gets a switchblade knife jammed into his nose near the end, another Chinatown reference. Famous knives abound. Earlier in the movie a character gets stabbed to death with a Rambo-style tactical knife.
MaXXXine revels in Hollywood references including the Walk of Fame and the iconic Hollywood sign. It's about studio backlots and behind-the-scenes moviemaking moments that film geeks never tire of seeing.
As a detective story, MaXXXine stumbles a bit, introducing us to two bungling homicide detectives who we have seen in countless movies like this. One of them, played by Bobby Cannavale, is a failed, wannabe actor whose lack of talent is a liability even in his job as a cop. Shakespeare was right when he said that all the world’s a stage.
Production-wise, it’s hard to know if MaXXXine is trying to emulate the dark grungy look of classic Eighties movies or whether the filmmakers simply lacked the budget to light the scenes more professionally. It’s dark and stark and edgy, and you could argue that the underexposed images underscore the drama and suspense. You could also argue that it just looks gaudy and cheap.
Cheap isn’t necessarily bad. Some low-budget projects are pretty good at turning budgetary restrictions to their advantage. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a textbook example. Chocolate syrup can look like gushing blood when it’s shot in black-and-white.
MaXXXine is getting a lot of attention and buzz. It earned positive reviews in major magazines and newspapers. Directors like Martin Scorsese are praising it.
While it might not have the kind of non-traditional bang that Pulp Fiction had when it was released back in 1994, MaXXXine, at the very least comes off as a nostalgic time trip—a walk-on-the-wild-side romp along the lines of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
To its credit, MaXXXine plays with historic details but doesn’t attempt to completely re-write well-known, well-established historical facts.
It’s a trashy, fun, gorefest of a film that will be a guilty pleasure at the summer box office—the junk food cinematic equivalent of a Big Mac with fries and lots of ketchup.
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